Homes Do Double Duty As Libraries

U.S. & Latin America - CUBA REPORT

HAVANA -- The holes in her roof are patched with sheets of zinc. A Santeria altar is displayed under the television in one corner of her cramped living room.

And in the other, Yolanda Triana Estupinan, a former preschool teacher, busily gives her neighbor a manicure.

Improbable as it may seem, Triana Estupinan's home is the setting for one of the fastest-growing sectors of Cuba's limited civil society: independent lending libraries. She has only about 250 books arranged on two wooden shelves, and most are decidedly apolitical, including beautifully illustrated children's stories, novels and poetry.

Yet a closer look reveals a copy of the U.S. Constitution and textbooks on democracy. Triana Estupinan's most "compromising" books are hidden in a back room. They include The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel's treatise on dissidents in Eastern Europe; and former Cuban political prisoner Ernesto Diaz Rodriguez's Castro's Hostages.

Fidel Castro unwittingly inspired the independent-library movement when he declared at a Havana book fair in February 1998 that there were no censored books in Cuba, only limited funds for public libraries. A dissident couple in the eastern city of Las Tunas took Castro on his word and established the island's first independent library a month later. Since then, at least 75 others have cropped up, mostly in the spare bedrooms, closets and living rooms of opposition leaders. Dissidents, however, insist the project is cultural, not political.

"The revolution has given us a high level of education, but it also censors a lot and determines what people read," said Gisela Delgado, who heads the independent-library movement from her apartment in Havana's Vedado district.

Delgado said the 400 or so borrowers from her library are as diverse as the titles on her shelves, from students seeking reference materials to professionals looking for something more than the state libraries offer.

"Some people come at night because they think they aren't being watched," said Delgado, whose husband, Hector Palacios, is one of the island's leading dissidents.

Most books are donated by international nongovernmental organizations or foreign embassies in Havana, including the U.S. Interests Section, which sends a van several times a week to deliver books and magazines. Some shipments sent by mail never make it past customs officials, who deem certain texts "counter-revolutionary." Delgado showed a reporter a form filled out by a customs official last year, explaining that three books sent from Italy were seized for "threatening the general interests of our nation."

Some of the more-dicey authors include the young Cuban-American writer Zoe Valdes; Guillermo Cabrera Infante, an early supporter of the revolution who has since become one of Castro's most outspoken critics; and Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa.

Although books are sometimes confiscated en route to the libraries, the librarians interviewed said state security officials have not inventoried their collections or seized books from the shelves.

Estrella Garcia Rodriguez, who founded her library in the bustling Chinatown district after Castro's comment, agreed.

"As a member of the opposition, I've been detained," she said. "But they've never bothered me about the library. In every province, there are libraries. Many are inaugurated in secret and later revealed."